photos by Juliet Guzman
Upon hearing CIVEROUS’ debut album, Decrepit Flesh Relic, one was left with a feeling of intense suffocating weight and agonal prostration in the service of bone-breaking death hymns. With the towering new album Maze Envy, Los Angeles’ most creatively destructive death/doom ensemble lets loose a freshly evolved but no less brutal conflagration of immersive horror and morbid lamentation.
Where death/doom may often stay in safe and unadventurous realms of narrow focus, Maze Envy presents a more far-reaching breadth of ambition, where unusual technicality, progressive atmospheres, string flourishes, and chaotic mysticism radiate a purple light of the soul’s ascension from the black oceans of dread CIVEROUS inhabits. Chain-dragging dirge, blackened blasting, and the savage ferocity of Lord Foul’s hellish vocal exorcisms exalt Mazy Envy with a hellish grandeur within its myriad paths to oblivion.
With a massively crushing sound, Maze Envy is end-of-times music for an age in which that reckoning feels unfathomably close. CIVEROUS batters the senses into a state of labyrinthian turmoil from which emergence is ever more implausible.
Maze Envy was recorded between Winter 2022 and Summer 2023, engineered, mixed, and produced by Andrew Solis (Apparition) at Deadstare Audio with additional engineering by Kevin McCombs at The Steakhouse, North Hollywood, and mastered by Nick Townsend at Infrasonic Sound. The record features captivating cover art by Juanjo Castellano (Majesties, Voidceremony, Avulsed, Gates Of Ishtar), photography by Juliet Guzman, and layout by Dan Fried, completing a record prime for fans of Spectral Voice, Disembowelment, My Dying Bride, Worm, Ceremonium, Tzompantli, Krypts, and Rippikoulu.
The lead single from Maze Envy, “Labyrinth Charm,” features a guest vocal appearance by Derek Rydquist (The Zenith Passage, The Faceless), and arrives in the form of a chaotic new video.
Watch CIVEROUS’ video for “Labyrinth Charm” now at THIS LOCATION and stream the track everywhere including Bandcamp HERE.
20 Buck Spin will release Maze Envy on LP, CD, MC, and digital platforms March 22nd. Find merch and preorder options at the label webshop HERE and Bandcamp HERE.
Watch for additional previews of the album to drop over the bleak weeks ahead.
Maze Envy Track Listing:
1. The Azure Eye
2. Shrouded In Crystals
3. Endless Symmetry
4. Labyrinth Charm (Featuring Derek Rydquist)
5. Levitation Tomb
6. Maze Envy
7. Geryon (The Plummet)
CIVEROUS is plotting tour dates in support of Maze Envy, the band already confirmed to play multiple Spring and Summer festivals including Disemboweled God Fest 2024 in Seattle with Mortiferum, Druid Lord, Drawn And Quartered, Tithe, and more, the inaugural Austin Death Fest with Tomb Mold, Witch Vomit, Mortiferum, Outer Heaven, Sentenced 2 Die, Lunar Chamber, Maul, Torture Rack, and others, Death Over Bakersfield 2024 with the likes of Apparition, Fórn, Abyssal and Funeral Leech, and Deadstock II alongside Abstracter, Mephitic Corpse, Apparition, and many others. Stand by for live updates throughout the year.
CIVEROUS Live:
3/29-31/2024 Disemboweled God Fest 2024 @ Belltown Yacht Club – Seattle, WA
4/27-28/2024 Austin Death Fest @ Mohawk – Austin, TX
6/21-24/2024 Death Over Bakersfield 2024 @ Grumpy’s Brewing Co. – Bakersfield, CA
7/19-21/2024 Deadstock II @ TBA
CIVEROUS:
Lord Foul – vocals
Daniel Salinas – guitar
Alonso Santana – guitar
Drew Horton – bass
Aidan Neuner – drums
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